Land Use

In its short life, Portland’s South Waterfront has had a tumultuous history. And recently there seems to be somewhat of a collective desire to re-evaluate where the neighborhood stands and gauge its successes and failures. Is it an exemplary high-density, transit-connected, pedestrian-oriented 21st century neighborhood, or is it a cautionary tale? Or both?

The long-range planning behind South Waterfront was rooted in statewide land-use planning goals to curb suburban sprawl not only with urban growth boundaries but also, by extension, re-claiming heretofore industrial and other under-utilized parcels of land. It’s the same playbook that helped give rise to the formerly industrial Pearl District’s lofts and condos. Like the Pearl, South Waterfront especially took off in the 2000s thanks to the robust and booming real estate market. Besides the reasons these new neighborhoods fit into broader density schemes, it was a time when condo towers were shooting up not just to provide housing but as part of a rampantly speculative market in which people bought property to turn around and sell for a profit. South Waterfront wasn’t as well located as the Pearl, being downriver from the urban core and pinned in by I-5 against the river, but it also had a core occupant besides the condo owners and a few retailers: OHSU in its burgeoning riverside campus, connected to its main Marquam Hill campus by the Portland Aerial Tram.

Then came the recession beginning in 2008, the price of the which for South Waterfront was not just the foreclosures but the lost momentum: the dwindled sense that this could be a vibrant urban place. More so than the Pearl, the South Waterfront was a kind of idea that had to be sold.

Maybe some residents who came in the early 2000s never left: they bought their condos to live in, with the promise of a river view and a close relationship with the water, as well as an easy streetcar ride to downtown and, thus, a potentially carless Portland lifestyle. South Waterfront was never literally a ghost town. Yet for a few years post-’08, it felt a lot quieter on the streets of SoWa than its backers would have liked, and as a result the district felt all the more isolated from the rest of the city. After all, for all its closeness to downtown and its myriad mass transit options (the tram, the freeway, a new MAX line and coming-soon bridge), South Waterfront is not only pinned between the freeway and the river but isolated even from Riverplace and other buildings to the north because of the vacant Zidell Yards parcel.

Now, though, South Waterfront is starting to feel busier, better connected in myriad ways, and more vibrant.

Part of that comes from the recession having given way to a booming real estate market again. Most of the condo buildings are close to full now, and new projects, including affordable housing and apartments, have joined the mix. There are more retail establishments open for business, and a greater mix of people. And with the land to the north starting to get built—first the Collaborative Life Sciences Center, but soon the Tilikum Crossing bridge and the Zidell Yards itself, there is an increasing sense that South Waterfront is not simply an urban island between the freeway and the river but part of one continuous strip of urbanity that includes John’s Landing to the south as well as Riverplace and ultimately downtown to the north.

South Waterfront condos (photo by Brian Libby)

In other words, it’s not just that there are building cranes in South Waterfront, or that much more building is planned to the north, but that the neighborhood that began here during the 2000s has now had at least a few years to grow into itself, which is bearing fruit.

This maturation of South Waterfront was the topic of a radio discussion I participated in earlier this week on OPB’s Think Out Loud program. First host Dave Miller talked with the owner of Bambuza Vietnamese Kitchen (where the show was broadcast), a business that came to South Waterfront early, clawed through some slow times, and now is thriving.

After I was interviewed about the history of the land predating south waterfront as well as the architecture and urban planning that comprise its current form, residents like writer and poet Floyd Skloot talked about the enjoyment living beside the river. “Our desire was to come as close as we could to living in nature while living downtown,” Skloot said. “We wanted the light, we wanted the view, and we wanted the sense that there was nothing really between us and what we could see outside our window. We have an unimpeded view of Ross Island and the river, and we do feel like we have succeeded. We’ve seen 60 distinct bird species outside our window, and we’re attuned to the river itself, both as recreation and as habitat.”

The neighborhood also feels increasingly home to a diverse array of people, if not racially than at least in terms of age and other factors like economics. As the interviews with OPB went on, I caught sight of a Montessori school class playing in the park across the street. There is a senior housing tower, the Mirabella, and the Gray’s Landing affordable housing.

All that said, little of this conversation has really been about architecture, and yet that is where the South Waterfront has in some ways represented a departure from much of the rest of the city. It’s a neighborhood of tall towers, unmistakable as one comes around the corner on I-5 north. Portland in the past has gone by the Stumptown moniker not just for the trees that were cut down to build the city, but also for our tendency to build shorter, squattier buildings. The SoWa towers, though, were allowed to go taller than residential buildings nearly anywhere else in the city, but more slender, in the “point tower” style associated with cities like Vancouver, British Columbia. That decision irked residents of the West Hills and nearby neighborhoods like Lair Hill, concerned about lost views. But it has brought a greater density than probably would have been possible with four or five-story buildings.

There is no one tower in South Waterfront that I really love. Some, like Atwater Place by THA Architecture or the John Ross by TVA Architects, can perhaps be characterized as handsome. But others are mediocre at best. What might have made the cluster of buildings look better together, however, would be a little more variation in height. They all feel like they’re about the same level of verticality. As one architect characterized it to me off-record, it’s almost like hairs in a flat-top haircut. A more elegant solution might have been to step down to the river, with taller buildings closer to I-5 and smaller ones at the riverside. But South Waterfront was in some ways a leap of faith for the developers and elected officials who gave it birth, and it’s easy to see the financial reasons why that reduction of capacity didn’t happen.

Tilikum Crossing and South Waterfront (photo by Brian Libby)

Although Skloot’s point about residents being able to get a close-up relationship with the river is valid, I do wonder if there could have been more of a public presence along the riverfront. It’s not just that the South Waterfront Greenway has taken several years longer than initially expected to come to fruition (it’s under construction now). Retail is scattered throughout the district, without much of a there there. I wonder if the waterfront could have become a focal point for more ground-level retail, with restaurants and outdoor tables beside the water.

OHSU gives a presence of more than just residential and retail buildings in South Waterfront, but I would also like to see some kind of public building either here or in the newer Zidell Yards parcel in the years ahead: a museum, for example, or an arts center. The best urban places include a wide variety: of building sizes, styles and types, and of activities happening there. South Waterfront is likely on its way to becoming that, but it still needs more diversity, in every sense of the word.

As I said in the Think Out Loud discussion, the great cities, be it Paris or Amsterdam, Melbourne or Kyoto, are repositories of generations building upon the accomplishments of the past. They have a patina to them, and a sort of controlled chaos at times. South Waterfront still has that new-car smell, one might say. But it’s in the earliest stages of its life. And while it can feel pinned in or like an island at times, the district’s bounty of transit options—including not only streetcar and light rail but the new bridge over the Willamette as well as the pedestrian bridge over the freeway—make South Waterfront into a crossroads, at once in the middle of the city even as it’s slightly removed from it.

What’s more, while SoWa may always feel like a place of the early 2000s, with most all its buildings coming from that era, the Zidell Yards will add another chapter, one we’re already seeing with buildings like The Emery, an alternative to the tall towers where ground-level businesses are thriving. And the Zidells have talked a lot about not just the buildings that might go there but the spaces in between, such as potential public areas like the space under the Ross Island Bridge and perhaps even a place at the riverside or in the river to get one’s feet wet.

After all, we already dove into this effort more than a decade ago. South Waterfront still can feel a little alien at times compared to the rest of the city, but it’s starting to feel like a place with energy, and a place that can ride out the ups and downs of history.

It's a plan the mayor's own handpicked experts have expressed reservations about. It's on an accelerated pace that even its tentative supporters question. And it may be a case of the haves taking from the have-nots that demonstrates Portland isn't as different and progressive as one might hope.

Last night, watching a hearing of the Portland Planning & Sustainability Commission about annexing West Hayden Island's wildlife sanctuary for an expanded deep-water industrial port, I thought of a moment from The Simpsons.

In an episode called "Mr. Lisa Goes To Washington," the family travels to Washington, DC for Lisa to compete in an essay contest. Tasked to write about America's greatness, Lisa begins enthusiastically but, after witnessing a senator accepting a bribe in order for a forest to be clear-cut, instead unleashes a diatribe of bitter commentary. The episode has a happy ending: because of Lisa's essay, the senator is arrested for bribery. I'm not sure the same fate awaits those pressing forward with annexation of West Hayden Island, nor should it. I don't think these are outright villains, but instead people who believe job and industry growth is priority number one. Given the recession of recent years, one can't blame that kind of thinking. Yet we shouldn't sacrifice values to choose a few potential jobs twenty years down the road.

The Portland metro area is said to have a shortage of deep-water ports, the kind that can service today's super-sized ships and barges. (Never mind that Vancouver can help solve that shortage - we're not allowed to think of the two cities on either side of the river as the same, or even having shared interests.) West Hayden Island has admittedly been eyed for decades as a place of industrial expansion. It was first brought into the Urban Growth Boundary in 1983, when the Port of Portland bought the land from PGE. In 1994 it was designated a Regionally Significant Industrial Area.

But West Hayden has also long since been identified as a critical natural area, both as it relates to wildlife and as a crucially important flood plain protecting the city from increasingly likely floods in the new era of climate change. Its more than 800 acres of forest, wetlands, meadows, and shallow water habitat near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers provide irreplaceable habitat for federally listed salmon and imperiled bird, bat and amphibian species. Bald eagles' nests are a common site there. Quite simply, West Hayden is the largest wildlife sanctuary in our Portland metro region.

Couple that with the fact that West Hayden is home to Oregon's largest manufactured home community, and you have a case of the Powers That Be making an appalling dual-front attack on both the environment and on a poor community.

And here I thought Republicans were in the minority of our city's political leadership.

Scenes from "Mr. Lisa Goes To Washington"

Last night's hearing before the Planning and Sustainability Commission, the only opportunity for public comment, was practically a caricature of self-serving moneyed interests pitted against community members fighting only for values and their homes.

Whenever someone testified in favor of industrial annexation, he or she came from an organization that would directly benefit from the environmental usurpation. A union representative whose colleagues would be hired for the construction on West Hayden spoke of "family-wage jobs," implying that trying to save endangered species directly resulted in his babies going unfed. A series of business and port alliance representatives, neckties removed from their black suits, sung the praises of industrial development and finished their remarks to the sound of silence from the packed audience or some poor unironic single clap. Whenever a homeowner about to be displaced or choked by diesel fumes pleaded with the council for mercy, or an environmental group leader pleaded for the accelerated timetable to be slowed down, a chorus of applause rang out from the commission chamber and its filled overflow-room.

The annexation of West Hayden Island would be troubling enough in its own right, but now Mayor Sam Adams is attempting to skip the unfolding process and bring about a City Council vote by the end of the year. Even those at last night's hearing tentatively willing to support the annexation admitted they felt blindsided and disappointed by the mayor's effort to seal the deal before he leaves office at year's end. Most of the community groups at the hearing, such as a group of Native American tribes with ancestral connections to the Columbia and to West Hayden, told the Planning and Sustainability Commission they had never been brought to the negotiating table until the deal was already done.

Adams argues that the process of annexing West Hayden has taken some thirty years, and that he's merely taking the needle off a skipping record. But the thirty years of gridlock on this issue ought to tell us something.

Consider the fact that in 2009, after the City of Portland initiated planning for annexation of West Hayden Island, the mayor's handpicked Community Working Group, charged with poring through studies and data to deliver a recommendation on Hayden, could not come up with one. The Community Working Group reported to Adams that it could not resolve the inherent conflict between industry and the environment.

The reason this has taken 30 years is that the city can't seem to accept the inherently incestuous, greedy nature of its actions. We keep revisiting the issue in hopes that the bald eagles won't be in the way, or that the flood plain isn't an ideal way to protect us from floods, and then blame the process itself for stifling the industrial invasion.

The West Hayden Island annexation plan is to take 300 of the remaining 800 acres for Port of Portland expansion. That may sound like a fair trade-off at first: wildlife still gets more than half. But think of those 800 total acres as the last toothpaste in a tube already squeezed to the limit. Aside from a few tiny parcels here and there, the city has already taken virtually all of the wildlife area that ever existed in the Portland area. If we take 300 of 800 acres remaining on West Hayden Island, we're not leaving more than half to wildlife and the floodplain. We're going from 98 percent of local wild areas claimed for development to 99 percent. We're squeezing the very last remnants out of the toothpaste tube and expecting no future cavities to form.

Today people from all over America are turning their attention to Portland as an example of the future of cities: a place where, unlike in Phoenix or Houston or Atlanta, we really do consider what ecologists call the "triple bottom line" of people, planet and profit. But here is a case where people and profit are ganging up on planet, and the charge is being led by leaders of our city. I pity the good people in the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, or the Planning and Sustainability Commission, whose jobs depend on carrying out the mayor's plan even though the very names of their institutions call this into question.

It's not to say that Portland shouldn't be concerned about competing in a global economy. Today's world is far too interconnected economically for us not to make international trade, and the shipping that enables it, a high priority. But Portland may not even be able to attract the new generation of giant vessels to a deep-water West Hayden Island facility; its construction is being hyped as a risk-free endeavor enabling business that is guaranteed to come. But it's really a case of economic speculating. We can look to the real estate market of the past four years to see how speculation can be catastrophic. We can also look across the Columbia river for a solution here: Vancouver has additional space for deep-water ports, yet the city is seen as a competitor rather than a collaborator. Here millions of dollars and countless peoples' homes and livelihoods are at stake, and we're legally obligating ourselves to act deaf to the solutions around us.

The city talks of mitigation for West Hayden Island: the idea that the acreage and wildlife sanctuary lost here can simply be given back somewhere else. But as Audubon Society conservation director Bob Sallinger told the commission at last night's hearing, "Little pieces do not make a whole." We can't set aside thin strips of riverbank, or stitch together patches of trees here and there, and call it proper wildlife protection.

Then there's the mitigation offered to low-income homeowners. Asked by a commission member what could be done to compensate her and her disabled-veteran husband, a resident told last night's audience tearfully that mitigation was never truly possible, only partial compensation for condemning their home against their will. The resident explained how one of her ancestors was executed in Salem, Massachusetts in 1610 for suspicion of witchcraft - and how now, with West Hayden probably doomed, she could understand the feeling of being persecuted.

Today's issue of Willamette Week includes a small blurb in its Murmurs section that got me thinking about the relationship between the urban places we most want to frequent and the parking issues that can ensue. We want to be in places with no parking, it seems, as long as we can find a place to park.

The blurb was about how Southeast Portland neighbors are asking the city to freeze construction along Division Street, "hoping to halt the boom in apartment buildings without on-site parking," it explains. The neighborhood's request comes as the result of a four-story, 81-unit apartment complex at Southeast 37th Avenue and Division Street, which has already received permits to go forward. But with a succession of apartment and condo projects along Division and and other major streets, there seems to be a growing chorus of neighborhoods feeling the growing scarcity of on-street parking, much as residents of Northwest Portland's Alphabet District near 21st and 23rd Avenues have felt for the past few decades.

“Our neighborhood will be a congestion nightmare next summer and never the same after that,” Richmond neighborhood resident and novelist Richard Melo (as quoted in WW) wrote to City Commissioner Dan Saltzman, who oversees the Bureau of Development Services, calling the current course “a national case study for unchecked urban development.”

Coincidentally, just yesterday I received a form email from mayoral candidate Charlie Hales addressing parking and multifamily housing projects.

"A recent wave of new apartment projects has provoked controversy in several neighborhoods," the Hales team writes. "In our desire to support urban living and non-auto transportation, have we gone too far? When we first started trying to fit new mixed-use development into streets like Belmont, Division and Alberta, parking was a challenge, but in a very different way than today. Our struggle then was to get developers and banks to accept less parking than would be typical in suburbia. Now, the world has changed. Banks are today willing to lend on apartment projects with no parking provided. While this has resulted in affordable projects for those without cars, there are other unintended consequences impacting neighborhoods in ways that need to be carefully assessed."

So it would seem that there is growing push-back in Portland's neighborhoods about the growing scarcity of parking spots. If that's the case, it's a break from the city's reputation for progressive pedestrian and transit-oriented developments. In urban policy circles, the talk is not of disgruntlement over decreasing parking, but innovating and prospering because of such deliberate moves. In an August 7 Atlantic Cities post, Norman Garrick and Christopher McCahill of the University of Connecticut explore Zurich's approach to restricting parking while most cities in America and the west have parking minimums.

"Since the late 1980s, Zurich has developed an alternative that's worth studying because it breaks all the rules of conventional transportation planning, and yet has been vitally important to the success of that city," they write. "In contrast, the conventional approach has devastated most American cities, and many in Europe as well...Such a policy specifies the minimum amount of parking that must be provided for each square meter of floor space of new construction. The rationale of a parking minimum is to ensure that enough parking is available to meet projected demand."

In 1989, Zurich "turned this regulation on its head by adding parking maximums to their code. A parking maximum is a device for protecting the city from having too much parking that could degrade the urban character of the city....Under this new system, there is a default parking level for the whole city, which is then reduced depending on whether or not a particular location is well served by transit.

Garrick and McCahill's research at UConn found not only that cities with higher levels of automobile use generally supply more parking, but that these cities "also have a much lower density of what matters in cities, residents and jobs. American cities in our study with small numbers of parking spaces have two to four times more people per square mile. This seems to have a lot to do with the amount of space that is needed for parking. In other words, space used for parking is simply not available for more productive uses."

Granted, the Zurich example is focused more on its central core, whereas the aforementioned parking tension in Portland is taking place in close-in neighborhoods of mostly single-family homes. Yet I can't help but think of a previous Atlantic Cities post, by editor and creative-class guru Richard Florida, citing research by San Francisco real-state firm Trulia to determine which American cities have the highest concentrations of restaurants and bars. The two don't necessarily go hand in hand, it seems. The list of top ten cities for restaurants per capita, which included Portland at #10, was comprised entirely of East Coast and West Coast metropolises such as San Francisco (which took the top spot), New York, Boston and Seattle. The South and Midwest, on the other hand, dominated the list of cities with most bars per capita, including New Orleans (in first place), Toldedo, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. The bars list also reflected more cities that have lost out in the migrations of jobs, culture and knowledge to the West. When you're amidst rust rather than silicon, it's time for another round.

Richard Florida also cites a study by Arizona State University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte that finds a connection between the creative class and levels of entrepreneurship in cities. In other words, if you are good at growing restaurants, galleries and arts facilities, you're also probably going to be successful, over time, at attracting and growing small businesses. For example, the tech industry today, particularly social media companies and startups, is increasingly locating itself in cities rather than the suburbs. As the New York Times' Norimitsu Onishi recently reported, Twitter and other big tech companies are heading from Silicon Valley to San Francisco. Portland is also seeing a proliferation of startups headquarting here rather than in Hillsboro and Beaverton.

When I think of the parking tension along Division Street that Willamette Week reported, I can sympathize with the frustration of trolling for parking in one's own neighborhood, as I used to do daily when I lived downtown in the late 1990s. I think of the trolling we all do when we go to Northwest 23rd. But 23rd is ultimately getting a parking garage - not an eyesore of multistory concrete, but one thoughtfully tucked away. I think that's a better solution than restricting apartment and condominium projects because they'll add neighborhood congestion or requiring new developments to build their own parking, as we once did. Nobody likes parking, but it's a bit of a Catch-22 situation here: the more you build parking, the less likely it is to be a place where people want to go - and park, and spend money, and contribute to a vibrant local economy. Portland has long since committed itself to density over sprawl, and we can't have it both ways. And I'd rather we be more Zurich than, say, Houston or Toledo.

Screen capture from the in-progress film Open Road (courtesy of the artist)

BY BRIAN LIBBY

Today online fundraising campaigns are ubiquitous. Whether it's via Kickstarter or other sites, most of us have become accustomed to and maybe even exhausted by the continuous stream of people seeking one's contribution to any number of artistic, entrepreneurial, charitable or educational opportunities. On Kickstarter today, for example, the main page shows one project to send 1,000 student projects to the edge of space, "each one inside a ping pong ball," a photography book about vinyl album collectors, and a children's toy called The Humble Velocipede, "A desktop bamboo walking machine."

But recently I received an email about a fundraising project that gave me pause, from Portland filmmaker Alain LeTourneau for his new feature, Open Road . The film's central thesis is one of those truths that can hide in plain sight sometimes: that however much we may think of the roads and highways where we drive or the garages where we park as pass through spaces, they constitute a vast portion of the collective built environment. (The funding campaign on USA Projects, by the way, ends this Friday, August 3.)

Le Tourneau has spent the past decade or so both as a film exhibitor - he cofounded the much lauded Cinema Project screening series as well as a successor, 40 Frames - and as a filmmaker in his own right. Before writing about architecture as I do today, I used to principally write about and review movies, and the documentary LeTourneau codirected with Pam Minty about Southeastern Oregon's blend of natural beauty and agriculture, Empty Quarter, is among my all time favorites. (You can watch clips from it here.) Shot on 16mm black and white and featuring a series of long, elegant takes without the usual succession of quick cuts or narration, Empty Quarter is enveloping and beautiful even as it provides a real-life chronicle of farms, families and their dependence on the landscape.

Recently I interviewed LeTourneau about his new film and the perspective through which he sees Portland, his hometown.

Portland Architecture: Your last feature film, "Empty Quarter", chronicled the rural landscape of southestern Oregon and its agricultural communities there. What kind of connecting thread to you see between the topic of that film and "Open Road" with its focus on roads and automobiles? Is it that both are sort of familiar yet ignored in some manner?

LeTourneau I think you've touched on something that is a central focus to my film and photography work, this idea of landscapes becoming so common as to almost be invisible. The images in Open Road and Empty Quarter are not calendar and coffee table book images, which is not to say they don't possess some beauty. The images simply frame aspects of urban and rural landscapes that are seldom given much attention, at least not in popular movies, on television, etc.

Another thread is John Charles Fremont and his expedition in the mid-1840s that brought him through southeast Oregon and up to Fort Vancouver. Fremont named Abert Rim and Abert Lake (both in Lake County) after his commanding officer. Fremont's name is also scattered across the west with town, lakes, rivers and other geography having been given his moniker. In Portland, there is of course the Fremont Bridge. As it happens, I live about a mile from the bridge’s Cook Street approach. The bridge not only figures prominently in Portland's skyline and is an icon of the city, but has some personal resonance for me as well. The date of the bridge's completion is also the year of my birth. Growing up in the metro area, my mother and I would frequently drive over the Fremont to visit my grandmother who lived downtown in the Portland Center Apartments.

What are some roads or other structures related to automobile travel here in the Portland area that are distinctive to you or might have helped shape the thinking that is going into the film?

The way I-5 and I-405 encircle downtown and cross the Willamette I've always found very interesting. That such roads dominate the landscape is certainly not unique to Portland, one can find it in many cities, but it was these forms and structures that first inspired Open Road. The I-5 trench that cuts through North Portland is also featured in the film. Its construction had an enormous impact on the neighborhood when built, and the Columbia Rive Crossing will certain present a whole new host of impacts.

I also became interested in the surface parking lots downtown, mostly in old town. This idea of car storage is very compelling to me. I read somewhere that in the span one year, a car is (on average) in transit (that is, moving) about 400 hours. This leaves the other 8,360 hours that the car is at rest, or parked. That's 95% of time in one year. So, for the life of a car, most of the time the car will be parked. I find this interesting, in light of traffic often being thought of as a key issue of automotive transit in America. The space required for parking is equal or greater than that required for roads. This is something worth giving our attention.

Are you someone who finds freeway overpasses beautiful? I've photographed them frequently over the years, and so have many others - eyesore though this type of infrastructure may commonly be. The short film on your USA Projects site portrays one of the most dramatic of local overpasses I've seen, where the Fremont bridgehead on the east side gives way to I-5.

The Fremont Bridge, particularly on the east side, has been featured in a number of films by local makers. I can recall seeing it in Nick Peterson and Matt McCormick's films, amongst others. It's hard to deny the striking beauty of the Fremont, or for that matter, many of the freeway structures in Portland. There is this wonderful almost chiseled or sculptural quality to these forms. They are massive, and they dwarf even the largest of landscape art by the likes of Heizer, De Maria or Smithson.

In photographing the urban sites that appear in Open Road, I think of the conflict that photographer Robert Adams spoke of. The critique Adams was involve in when choosing his composition, in contrast to the sheer beauty of the object and the light falling on it. I think it's characteristic of the relationship many artist have to the subject of their work. On some level, you have to be drawn to what you choose to photograph or capture, even if it is something you find yourself very much in conflict with or in opposition to. Also, there is for me a desire to present images that are pleasurable to look at, even if at the same time capturing something that is need of changing.

Over the Christmas holiday, I did a lot of driving within Oregon for get-togethers with family. I drove to Eugene on the day of the 24th, to McMinnville the evening of the 24th, and to a farm outside Gaston on the 25th. At first my focus was the holidays and the relatives I'd see, or the caffeine I'd need to get through two marathon days. But as I made my way through the Willamette Valley, with its lush greenery, fertile farmland and gently rolling hills, the landscape itself gave me pause.

I'd already grown up in the Willamette Valley, born in Eugene and raised in McMinnville. But I rarely, if ever, thought about the natural beauty surrounding me. Oregon's natural wonders seemed to be more dramatic sites like Mt. Hood and the Cascades, the Columbia Gorge, high deserts to the east and the Oregon Coast to the west. But then, while in college in New York, the valley landscape upon my return seemed to look different, which was confimed by the awe my college friends would show when visiting.

The valley isn't comprised of soaring heights or crashing water, but it reminds us that the word "pastoral" has multiple definitions, all which fit the Willamette Valley. The word not only refers to the rural countryside, but also means idyllic, and "of or relating to spiritual care or guidance." If there is no singular postcard image of a peak or a body of water, there is the collective tapestry of land and sky.

What's more, the Willamette Valley is what our ancestors came to Oregon for. The Oregon Trail that carried thousands here during the Great Migration of the 19th Century eventually split two ways: to the southwest for those seeking fortune and fame, or to the northwest for those seeking fertile soil and quality of life. Today, it's not to say there isn't beauty or agriculture in California, nor is it impossible to get famous in Oregon. Yet these diverse landscapes - the brown scrubland with gold buried underneath, and the temperate greenery revealing the possibilities of the plow - still comprise much of our regional identities. I'd argue that the Willamette Valley is the essence of Oregon for this reason: it was the stage for the place that we made here.

In January, I'll be teaching a class called "Urban Discourses", which uses Portland as a template for learning about cities themselves. Although much of my preparation has centered on how our city resembles and differs from other cities - architecturally, artistically, economically - my mind often turns back to the landscape of Oregon and how it, along with the climate, defines us.

Just as rain makes the plants a particularly verdant green, for example, it also fosters a more mellow populace that favors reading books, making arts and crafts. It's cool enough here that we aren't sun worshipers bronzing to melanoma levels on our beaches. It's warm enough that we're not locked indoors all winter. Maybe some people complain about the rain, but the water seems to often wash away the most pretentious and extreme personalities back to points south or east. It reminds me of a Bill O'Reilly interview of David Letterman from a few years ago: O'Reilly was pestering Letterman to answer a question quickly. Reilly said, "Come on. Yes or no? It shouldn't take you more than a second." Letterman replied, "It takes longer for me because I'm thoughtful."

Oregon is thoughtful, and I reckon our mild climate and pastoral landscape, particularly the valley floor, fosters it. But perhaps we're also shaped by those who were here first: Native American tribes once flourished in the valley and throughout Oregon, instilling a value system of natural reverence that remains today. And Oregon was the last territory in the United States to be given up by Great Britain: is it a coincidence that we are unfailingly polite iconoclasts?

Even if one can't ever completely untangle why we are what we are, it's more than worth the time to set off from Portland to the south and west and simply get lost. Don't just drive on I-5 or even Highway 99W, but head off on those windy side roads as farmlands give way to forest, and as rivers like the Yamhill and the Santiam wind amongst the farms and small towns. To borrow from the state's former tourism slogan, things will look different here.

Two articles from the Daily Journal of Commerce illustrate the variety of ways - but not the only ones - that development can move forward amidst the persistent Great Recession.

As Angela Webber reports in one story, six Portland State University real estate students presented proposals last Wednesday for a 14-acre site between Northeast Sandy Boulevard, Interstate 84, and 20th Avenue called the Benson Blocks.

Though broken down into two potential proposals, "modest" and "robust" (depending on the economic conditions), each is a mix of high-density housing and retail. The larger plan includes condos and hotels, for example, while the smaller one sticks to rental apartments (both would include senior housing). Other properties proposed in various plans include an urban Costco store, a YMCA, and a new Portland Community College campus with potential for student apartments.

The presentations (available via PDF here) were made to local members the Building Owners and Managers Association, who in turned offered the students feedback. The proposals were also made in cooperation with the owner of this 14-acre site, Joe Weston, who also owns a variety of properties throughout Portland.

Kyle Brown, one of the students working on the Benson Blocks plan, told Webbber his biggest lesson was “how much parking can influence a development’s financial pro forma.” Both proposals called for underground parking and stand-alone parking structures. “It’s the biggest influence, which is kind of a bummer,” Brown said. “That’s the way things have to be built.”

Map of the Benson Blocks study (image courtesy PSU)

That said, the "robust" proposal also included a Sandy Boulevard streetcar, which could be a reality one day given the Portland transportation bureau's plans to move lines outward from the MLK/Grand loop currently being constructed.

Having constructive dialogue between students and members of the development community is certainly something to applaud. What's more, focusing these efforts on one large swatch of property makes things easier in terms of imagining broad multi-block place making.

Yet given how a streetcar line is currently coming to woefully under-utilized Grand and MLK area, one can't help but wonder if such a brainstorming session might have been applied here. After all, local developers would be the first to concede that following the streetcar is a recipe for business success, not simply hoping it comes in 15 years. The central eastside has blossomed over the past decade yet without the boom-and-bust cycle of the Pearl District. How could that district be enhanced, possibly with housing and office space, without overrunning its existing character? MLK and Grand are major thoroughfares, yet planners ultimately hope to create a more pedestrian friendly environment here. What's the right mix of traffic calming, transit and mixed-use buildings?

What's more, I can't help but feel that looking at one 14-acre parcel of land is somewhat of a copout. True urban infill development is difficult precisely because there are countless parcels owned by different people. If we're truly trying to teach real estate students to approach development intelligently, why not have them tackle the real problem and not simply dream within an easier exception?

Living in Southeast, I pass down MLK and Grand on a regular basis, and it's always a disappointment to encounter multistory mixed-use buildings with the upper floor windows boarded up. It would have been perhaps more educational for both the students and for us to have them look at a messier problem but one with help (via the new streetcar line) seemingly on the way.

Come to think of it, Portland already has another large, multi-block development that's been struggling to come up with a compelling vision and the right economic critical mass for half a decade: the Burnside Bridgehead. After initially selecting one developer, the Portland Development Commission ultimately moved to parcel out the parcels in a multi-developer format. Certainly there are economies of scale to be reaped from coordinating multiple buildings in one huge development, yet there is also an added challenge in keeping this house of cards together. Successful developments of this size such as Gerding-Edlen Development's Brewery Blocks may be the exception to the rule. And should the exception be the focus of student dreams?

Meanwhile, the DJC's Nick Bjork reports that the group o 28 local policy makers responsible for presenting recommendations to the Metro Council unanimously support "a modest urban growth boundary expansion" for the Portland-metro area. "But about two-thirds of the group’s members went further," Bjork writes, "and asked that the council also require residential zoning in those expanded areas to be as dense as most Portland neighborhoods."

Urban Growth Boundary map (image courtesy Metro)

This may be a case of one step forward and at least one step backward. Kudos for those trying to make the margins of the metro area's boundaries more walkable, sustainable, desnse and transit-oriented. Yet it also has to be said: why are we expanding the boundaries at a time when both the home building and office markets are at historically low levels? Yes, there are thousands moving to Portland each month. But given the world-renowned fertile farmland being plowed to expand the growth boundary, and the countless swatches of land available throughout the area, why in the world would we loosen the belt?

If we are going to expand the boundary, however, Allison Arieff's opinion piece in Sunday's New York Times, called "Shifting the Suburban Paradigm," might be a timely read. Arieff argues that the single-family homebuilding industry isn't doing nearly enough to respond to the changing needs and conditions involving single family homes. Too often, Arieff writes, home builders have responded to the Great Recession by creating new marketing plans instead of new products.

"We’re beyond the point of a fresh coat of paint and a new sales pitch. If we’re going to continue to hold on to the single-family home, we need to transform it," Arieff writes. "There is a demand for smaller, more energy-efficient homes in less car-dependent neighborhoods; all aspects of the industry, from designers to lenders to planners to consumers, should meet it. In this era of anti-government fervor, subsidizing the American Dream isn’t an option; transforming it is the only one we’ve got."

"I don’t care if we’re talking Le Corbusier, Cape Cods or Corinthian columns," Arieff (who previously was editor-in-chief of Dwell magazine) continues. "We can’t make any progress in housing until we stop thinking about the home as decorative object and begin considering it as part of a larger whole. How does it work on the street? In the neighborhood? How is it served by transit? Is it adaptable, allowing for the housing of extended families or the hosting of an entrepreneurial endeavor? Can the owner build an accessory dwelling (a.k.a. granny flat) to do so? (Most zoning, homeowners’ associations and CCRs don’t allow for it currently.) What needs to happen to zoning, to financing, to our very notions of resale value to change the suburban condition — and by extension, the American Dream as we know it?"

When I posted this article to Facebook, however, local architect Joseph Readdy added a perceptive critique. "Allison Arieff makes some excellent points about the buildings, but doesn't address the issue of urban form that makes suburbia so unsustainable," he wrote. "Bright green cities won't be made by addressing building efficiencies alone. The public realm counts, too."

Indeed, if we look at existing suburbs for infill growth, there is an opportunity - a necessity, actually - to examine how the traffic and the isolation can be improved. Suburbs, be they in Oregon or anywhere else, were designed for the automobile. Can they be retrofitted to make options for getting around other than driving? It's not enough to have a MAX station two miles away, or for the surface parking lots to trade a few of their stalls for extra landscaping and a bioswale. Readdy is right that we have to think not just of how to retrofit a house, but an entire suburb, and to do it with a carrot more than a stick: a way that makes people want to live there, and able to.

Last Friday, the City of Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability held the Willamette River Symposium #1. It was part of a series of panel discussions intended to establish policy recommendations for the Central City 2035 plan.

The goals of the symposium were to review existing conditions, policy and the endorsed 2006 River Concept; identify ways to achieve development, access and vibrancy while protecting and restoring natural resources and watershed health; and build on the 2006 River Concept policy guidance to address ways to meet these new goals.

In her introductory remarks, BPS director Susan Anderson called for a vision that will include the Central Reach as a commons and common resource shared by the whole community which will be passed to future generations.

The draft language reads, “The Central Reach will continue to be a highly urban, regional center with a waterfront that is the city’s main civic space and a regional attraction. Access to the river and public use of the waterfront will improve through new development and transportation improvements, eventually including changes to Interstate 5.” The document also calls upon Portland to:

Ensure a clean and healthy river

Maintain and enhance a prosperous working harbor

Create vibrant waterfront districts and neighborhoods

Embrace the river as Portland’s front yard

Promote partnerships, leadership and education

The audience was overwhelmingly comprised of planners and people whose principal work is in planning and policy, not surprising but nevertheless dismaying since the main goal is to make policy recommendations that will shape how our city is built for years to come. Still, it is commendable that the city has any public planning sessions instead of reviews after-the-fact, as it is a dense and detailed process with many implications to daily life.

The planning recommendations of the River Plan come principally from the background work of the 2001 River Renaissance Vision and the 2004 River Renaissance Strategy; the 2004 Willamette River Conditions Report; and the 1987 Willamette Greenway Plan. One is inclined to ask why there are so many plans. The simplest answer is that these are all living documents and, as such, reflect the current issues and priorities of the time in which they are created.

In fact, a distinct theme raised by panelists in Friday’s symposium was the concepts missing from previous documents. Infrastructure was one: At all levels of scale, the changes to or needs for infrastructure are integral to any plan and there is no strategic plan in place. Cultural concepts were another: As a group together as well as of the individual. So too was the concept of access, be it physical, visual, or economic. Then there is civic space, from the ideological (jobs, commerce, housing) and to the built (open space).

These omissions spurred a good deal of discussion. Civic space should be both indoor and outdoor and part of a system of spaces for the public, functional for smaller groups and individual use. It was agreed that we may not know what these civic spaces look like, but that it is important to consider the concept if we wish to have a vibrant urban and regional center. Currently, the simple definition of civic space at the Central Reach of the Willamette is the outdoor public open space which is more ceremonial and decorative than functional for the individual; people move through it or occupy it for a short time unless attending a large event. It is a literal translation of the front-yard concept but the scale and placement of it with respect to other types of space in the city and transportation connections limits the full realization of the concept in this form.

There were also comments by many panelists that were hard to disagree with. The plan needs to reference clear metrics to set policy and those policies for implementation need to be aspiration-driven as opposed to punitive. The use of "continue" in the main vision description for the Central Reach is an overstatement. It is not yet highly urban in use or form. There is no value statement on “urban” or a clear descriptor. “Urban” needs to be defined as "diversified urban with jobs, transportation, equity, access.” If the vision is for the city to continue being something, that definition should be clear and capable of describing an evolving environment.

Panelists also addressed a core issue which makes the planning process so difficult to understand, and which leads to the sometimes inconsistent statements from one document to another. Bob Sallinger, panelist from the Audubon Society, questioned the length of process from concept to strategy and plan. He cited the numerous changes in our region since 2006 and asked how the city might be swifter and expedite the planning process. It remains to be seen just how the process may be simplified or shortened but at least the topic is in the panelists’ and the public’s consciousness.

The Willamette River Symposium #2 will be held on Friday February 25 from 9AM-noon at BPS offices, 1900 SW 4th Avenue, Room 2500A.

Heidi Bertman received her Master's of Architecture from the U of O in 1998 and worked with Opsis Architecture before moving to ZGF Architects in 2004, where she is currently a designer.

Ryan Frank reports in Friday's Oregonian on an initiative led by city council member Nick Fish to bring more public greenspace and parks to portions of the city east of Interstate 205 currently underserved. The intent is to do so by leveraging public-private partnerships like the city has done in the central urban core.

This spring, Fish will propose $1 million in seed money be provided for a campaign called E205. "Fish hopes to pair that money with donations from the wealthy West Hills crowd," Frank explains. "Parks planners are still looking at where they would target the spending. But they will most likely focus the projects on land already owned by government agencies, such as schools, or vacant parcels owned by the Bureau of Parks & Recreation. The projects are supposed to be an interim step until the Parks Bureau can get voters to approve a large bond measure, possibly as soon as 2012."

The model here is Director Park, for which two affluent Portland families — the Schnitzers and the Moyers — contributed a total of $9.1 million, which was then paired with $6.4 million in city funds to "tear up a parking lot and replace it with honey-colored granite pavers," as Frank puts it. But it's important to also remember that Director Park was also underwritten by the fact that the garage from the adjacent Moyer-developed Fox Tower could be expanded underneath it. A continuous revenue stream from parking receipts may have helped prompt that philanthropy, admirable as it is.

Even so, it's also a mistake to be cynical about such public-private partnerships. This will likely be a major theme in the upcoming Rose Quarter makeover, for example: how the city can leverage its land surrounding and including Memorial Coliseum and the Rose Garden with high density private development without sacrificing too much in the way of design quality, public benefits and the right cultural fit.

If the E205 effort does succeed in attracting investment from the "wealthy West Hills crowd" mentioned in Frank's story through mere altruism and not as a quasi investment opportunity, it could be a tremendous benefit to a largely lower-income area of the city. There is a substantial difference between the collection of bioswales, fountains, parks and greenspaces in the central city and that in these outer neighborhoods, more so even than in similarly lower income demographic areas of Portland. Much of this territory was only annexed to the Rose City in the 1980s, and they feel like a kind of netherworld between Portland proper and eastern suburbs like Gresham. Sidewalks are shamefully rare here too - not just parks. If I lived in far east Portland, I'd be seeking a commitment from the Portland Department of Transportation as much as from the Bureau of Parks & Recreation. That said, perhaps additions such as the new MAX line extending from Gateway to Clackamas Town Center will begin to make these places more walkable and pedestrian friendly - more like Portland.

Yet there are interesting and sizable opportunities to let the greenery in east Portland sprout, places like Parklane Park at Southeast 155th Avenue and Main Street. It was initially a five-acre land parcel acquired in 1993 as a transfer from Multnomah County and its amenities include basketball courts, walking paths, a playground, soccer field, and softball field. That could just be a start, because three additional parcels, totaling about 20 acres, were purchased from Oregon Asphaltic Paving in 2001 and 2002 and are not yet developed or available for public use. With the right public-private partnership, that could change.

Although it may be naive to assume that individual donors will provide enough private funds, perhaps there is indeed a way to expand that to include corporate fundraising or even trading a small fraction of property for private development rights. It's not always an easy situation to handle. The phrase public-private partnership sounds so nicely cooperative and efficient, yet these endeavors must negotiate a lot of ambiguous decisions about just how to jumpstart and fund the process without something important being lost along the way.

It's all worth figuring out, of course, and doable, if for no other reason than that city dwellers should always be able to feel their feet on grass. The larger and more ultimately relevant conversation here, beyond issues of funding or property or government, is one of breaking down the barriers between urban and natural spaces. It's something architecture can help with, but retaining space and reverence for unpaved, flora and fauna-friendly landscape.

In Wednesday's Oregonian, Jeff Manning reported from the Home Builders Association of Metropolitan Portland's annual forecast breakfast. And while builders projections for the future are mixed at best, the conversation is illustrative of how the Great Recession's affect has created some changes of heart about the city's urban growth boundary.

"Congratulations on your survival," David Crowe, chief economist of the National Association of Home Builders, said in his remarks at the breakfast. "This has been the worst housing depression since the Great Depression. Any way you measure it, it's been just awful. And it's been going on for five years in some areas."

The HBAMP has traced builder confidence for 25 years. On a scale of ozero to 100, builder confidence hardly ever fell below 50 between 1985 and 2006. Today, it is at 16, Crowe said. Building permits for single-family homes in the Portland metro area exceeded 10,000 annually every year but one from 1993-2005. But permits fell substantially below 4,000 in 2009 and 2010.

One can't help but see today's low confidence as a direct result of overzealousness a few years ago. For example, through most all of the past century, Americans have spent an average of 3.2 times their annual income on the cost of a home. During the economic boom of the 2000s, the ratio reached as high as 4.7 nationally and 5.4 in Oregon.

In a city and region fashioning itself as the sustainability capitol of America, it's just not sustainable to expect people to spend 5 times their annual income on a house. It's not surprising that today the ratio has returned to more normal levels, a 3.26 rate nationally and 3.7 in Oregon.

There is some reason for hope. Interest rates remain historically low. And because so relatively few homes have been built here over the past three years, any uptake in the market could lead to a shortage of homes, which would be music to builders' ears.

Perhaps most noteworthy of all the remarks and attitudes to come out of the Home Builders Association of Metropolitan Portland's annual forecast breakfast was the admittance that our metro area's urban growth boundary has been a boon, not the boondoggle home builders used to see.

Tim Sullivan of John Burns Real Estate Consulting said at the breakfast that if not for the state's strict land-use laws, Oregon might have suffered a fate more like Phoenix or Las Vegas: massive overbuilding that has created an economic black hole, expecially in the once big-booming Sin City. "It's because of your urban growth boundary," Sullivan said. "You're the antithesis of Phoenix, where you can build anything, anywhere at any time."

Land-use laws like the urban growth boundary have frequently assailed by the Home Builders Association and other builders in the past. Opponents of the urban growth boundary have cited high housing prices as an indicator of the policy’s problems. Where land once accounted for about a quarter of the home-building cost, they argued, now it takes up to 40 percent of the cost. Something had to be done! They also suggested the Portland metropolitan area was facing a shortage of affordable housing as markets are hurt by the UGB factor. When the regional governing body Metro announced a few years ago that suburban Damascus would be the only initial area of expansion for the growth boundary, leaders in Hillsboro, Forest Grove and other 'burbs were irate.

After all, joining the UGB makes your land more valuable. A 2000 study by Eban Goodstein, an environmental and economic resources professor at Lewis & Clark College, explored whether the restricted supply of land created by growth management policies affected housing prices or whether Portland, like other hot cities, simply had more demand and speculation. He found land selling for $150,000 an acre at the edge of the boundary and $18,000 just beyond its border. But does this necessarily mean an argument for UGB expansion?

According to data from the National Association of Home Builders, the median price of homes in the Portland area rose from $85,000 in 1991 to $144,000 in 1996 and $220,000 in 2001. During that time, Portland's was the second-highest percentage increase in the country, setting up concerns about a crisis in affordable housing. But there was no accompanying data to show that the UGB was largely responsible. Other cities like Denver without growth boundaries saw parallel rises in home values.

Willamette Valley farmland near the UGB edge (photo by Brian Libby)

Some were critical of the UGB for a more practical reason: If places like Hillsboro and Forest Grove in Washington County have been responsible for adding jobs for the region, shouldn't that be tied to where the UGB is expanded? After all, the thinking goes, why allow a bunch of homes to be built in expanded UGB territory in an outer eastern suburb/small town like Damascus when the tech jobs are on the other side of the metro region? For this reasons, some builders and members of the real estate community have been in favor generally of the UGB but desirous of more flexibility.

Besides, many economists have come to believe housing prices are not a reflection so much of land use policy but demand.

“Fast-growing regions make housing prices rise,” said Joe Cortright, an independent economist working with the Westside Economic Alliance in a Portland Tribune story by Kristina Brenneman. “It’s really important to look at the demand-side factor,” Cortright said. “The rising price of housing shows you are becoming relatively desirable.”

Goodstein's 2000 study concluded that the urban growth boundary has had “a small, and statistically weak, upward influence on housing prices.” His figures found if the boundary were not in place, housing prices in the Portland area would be about $10,000 less on average. That's a lot, lot less than the value of most people's homes nationwide have already dropped in the last three years. But it's nothing compared to the money saved by maintaining the integrity of the region itself as a livable place. That ought to deliver some measure of confidence.

Anna Griffin had an interesting column in Wednesday's Oregonian about the strip mall at Cascade Station along Airport Way and how it calls into question the ways we gauge how developments succeed or fail.

Cascade Station is a 120 acre parcel of property that is owned by the Port of Portland. When it was first pitched in about 1999, this was supposed to be a pedestrian oriented mixed-use development. Instead, it has become a hive of big-box chain stores. But in the middle of a terrible economy, Cascade Station has thrived, at least in terms of sales and revenue. For example, Griffin reports that the Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant there is the 16th busiest of the chain's 600 franchises. 96 percent of the commercial side has been leased. And Ikea is, while certainly a big-box to end all big-boxes, very popular.

In other words, Portland failed at the goal of making Cascade Station an urban development, but it has succeeded - economically speaking - as a suburban one.

"This village thing was a great vision, but not there," shopping center developer Fred Bruning told Griffin. "If we hadn't built this, the entire place would probably still be vacant."

Indeed, there were quite a few years when, if you were riding the MAX to the airport, it would routinely stop at Cascade Station and nobody would get on or off. Now 6,000 people get on or off a MAX train at Cascade Station each week.

Cascade Station also probably succeeds in large part because of its ease of access and lack of sales tax for nearby Washington residents in Clark County, which already is mostly a suburban-feeling place anyway.

Here's an explanation from the Portland Development Commission of what happened with Cascade Station morphing from its original intended look and makeup:

"Unfortunately, following the execution of the agreement in 1999, development stalled due to the events of September 11, 2001 and because the site’s zoning precluded any retail larger than 60,000 square feet in size. This effectively precluded any anchor retail stores from locating there, and the small stores would not sign on."

"On February 17, 2005, the 1999 Plan District was amended with the intention of reviving development interest at Cascade Station. Development rights for the property were modified to allow, among other uses, up to three larger-format retailers. These anchor tenants are expected to provide the necessary customer draw that would spur the rest of the smaller retail to move forward, as well as the office and hotel uses."

PDC was perhaps between a rock and a hard place: seed the development with cheap plants that grow fast, or better fruit trees that might not bare any.

Griffin also ties her look at Cascade Station to Mayor Sam Adams' easing off of his refusal to support Walmart stores being established anywhere in Portland. Not long ago, Adams began talking with Walmart about an economic impact study for a store at Hayden Island, where he previously tried to keep the chain away. Some of this stems from the fact, as Griffin notes, that Walmart has spent many millions to buffet its image and appear more friendly to sustainability and smart city building. But a lot of it also has to do with the economy, and the fact that we can't be as picky about what kind of development we want when we really need development of any kind.

Advertisement taken from Cascade Station website

As for Cascade Station, I have to agree that it was probably never in the cards for this to be a pedestrian-oriented development, even with its MAX stops. But I suspect the people behind the development never had their hearts into the idea of urbanity.

When it was pitched as an idea in 1999, I attended a presentation on Cascade Station, and I specifically remember the would-be developers from Trammel Crow saying it would "look urban, work suburban". In other words, the office and stores might come all the way up to the sidewalk along Airport Way, but they would still have massive parking lots in back. And while MAX was a nice extra amenity, it was almost a non-factor, because the overwhelming majority of shoppers at Ikea and elsewhere would be coming and going in their cars.

In general, light rail and streetcars are seen as a development tool, particularly for creating mixed-use environments where people walk, bike and take mass transit as much as they drive - or more. However, this particular MAX line was really meant to connect people in downtown and other parts of Portland to the airport, not for creating this kind of compact, urban environment. Had Cascade Station's developers really wanted an urban place, they'd have needed to introduce a mix of housing with commercial and retail space, and created a grid or other street system with a scale of small blocks meant for pedestrians.

Cascade Station in all its asphalt glory, photo courtesy Daily Journal of Commerce

I think is the underlying truth in Griffin's column is that urban and suburban areas will always, to some extent, need each other. And we must remain flexible to both options.

To that end, Griffin's story ends with a quote from Bruning, the shopping mall developer. "When you travel to Europe, you leave the airport, and you immediately see industrial and commercial development," he says. "The first thing you see in some of the great cities of the world is Ikea."

I still consider it an open-ended question more than something I've completely figured out. Are big cities meant to have auto-oriented industrial and commercial developments on their outskirts, or could Cascade Station really have been something more than football field-sized parking lots and stores the size of the airplane hangars next door at the airport?

Meanwhile, the Portland Development Commission has moved toward shrinking the Airport Way urban renewal area. That's in part because law stipulates no more than 15 percent of the city's land can be an urban renewal area, and we're near the ceiling. But I wonder if somebody at PDC said to himself or herself, "I didn't get into the urban renewal profession so we could give breaks to Dress Barn and Staples."

I'll tell you this: Except for maybe the once-every-two-years sojourn to Ikea, I wouldn't take a single step towards the rest of the eyesore that is Cascade Station - not at Dress Barn, Marshall's, Ross Dress For Less, Red Robin, Jamba Juice, Kay Jewelers, Bath & Body Works, or even the International House of Pancakes. It says a lot that Cascade Station's website prominently features the phrase "tax free shopping" - all but an explicit admittance that the target market is more about big savings than a pleasant environment. But I wouldn't shop at these chains' outposts in Beaverton, Tigard or Gresham either. Yet lots of people do, and one can't pretend to know all their needs and motivations.

As Janie Har reported in Wednesday's Oregonian, Portland's city council is poised to approve a new plan for the Willamette River that has been in the works for over a decade.

The plan moves the city closer to a balanced relationship between industrial use, public access and ecology, and towards a future where, like Oregon's pioneering all-public ocean beaches, the riverbank is a shared resource with access for all.

In the Oregonian story, the focus clearly seems to be the opposition of local companies doing business along the river making up the Working Waterfront Coalition, such as Schnitzer Steel, barge builder Gunderson, and ship repair facility Cascade General. About 50 local businesses, with approximately 38,000 employees, move goods by water. The story's headline reads, "Portland officials push River Plan ahead, despite business opposition," yet environmentalists and public advocates have at least as much of an argument to make.

"A bigger hammer and more regulation is not the answer," T. Alan Sprott of Cascade General told Har in regard to the River Plan and its attendant protection policies. "We're competing with Vancouver and Bellingham and Newport and Coos Bay for these projects. Slowly but surely, those projects will go to those communities instead of here, and you will see an erosion of the (business) cluster that has grown here for over 60 years."

Last week City Council approved the first phase of the The River Plan, which deals with the North Reach, one of three sections the Portland portion of the river is divided into. The North Reach extends from Kelly Point Park to the Fremont Bridge on the west side and to the Broadway Bridge on the east side. The council is scheduled to take a final vote April 15.

Photo by Brian Libby

The River Plan was first forwarded by then-Mayor Vera Katz in 2000. The idea is to protect fish-spawning in the river and ensure there are enough trees for migrating birds. The Plan would require developers to set aside 15 percent of their property for landscaping (or use an eco roof), set back their structures at least 50 feet from the bank, and require projects expanding a business's footprint to undergo city review.

It's that last piece, city review, that has businesses particularly on the defensive. And one can sympathize with a company being apprehensive about dealing with new levels of government red tape.

At the same time, I would argue that these businesses need to look at the longer view, which is a steady move away from letting industrial businesses dominate riverside property without allowing any public movement along the water.

There used to be a time when Oregon's ocean beaches were often private, and that's still the case in much of coastal America. There also used to be a time in Portland, much more recently, when hardly any of the Willamette Riverfront was available to the public to walk along. That has slowly changed with the introduction of the Vera Katz Eastbank Esplanade and the Willamette Greenway. But the city still has a long way to go towards the ultimate goal of making the entire riverbank a continuous public path. And that is clearly the future.

Obviously any city, Portland included, needs to reserve a portion of its waterfront for industry, particularly the moving of goods and services. The Willamette and Columbia rivers, besides being beautiful and thus magnets for the public, are also industrial routes. In past decades and even centuries, ever since the Industrial Revolution or even before, urban riverbanks have been restricted places meant more for cranes than pedestrians. But look at any progressive waterfront city in the developed world, and you'll find locals wanting an increasing segment for themselves, and justifiably so.

"This plan was supposed to serve the entire community," said Bob Sallinger, conservation director of the Audubon Society of Portland, at last week's hearing. "At some point it became all about them (businesses) and only about them."

T. Alan Sprott of Cascade General may have a legitimate concern regarding Portland's competition with other regional ports and creating a level business and regulatory playing field. Even so, heavy industry is going to have to make more room on the sofa, not less. People want to walk along the river with greenery around and know there are fish in the water, not pollution. Nobody wants port-oriented business and those 38,000 jobs to go away, but the rules along the river are changing. The accompanying regulation is not a "bigger hammer", as Sprott calls it, but a better-working scale that balances public and private needs.

A few weeks ago I spent a weekend at the Oregon Coast. While driving west on highway 26 through the Coast Range toward Cannon Beach and Seaside, I was appalled at the amount of forest that had been clearcut. From the road one could see thousands of acres of rolling hills in the Tillamook and Clatsop forests where there had recently been healthy ecosystems, now decimated to be as bare as Samson's scalp. I wondered if it was my imagination that more clearcutting seemed to be apparent than in the recent past.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying state forests can't be logged. After all, I'm writing this from a wood-framed building stocked with lots of wood furniture. If I could, I'd replace my vinyl linoleum floors with a nice wood parquet for that Boston Garden effect. I'd replace my ratty recliner with a wood-backed Eames chair.

But it turns out I was on to something when it comes to the Tillamook and Clatsop forests and the debate over just what their purpose is: an industrial tree farm or a natural wonder.

Earlier this year, the Oregon Board of Forestry moved toward a new policy on the Tillamook and Clatsop forests, voting to boost the cut on state forests. Apparently this came after demands from the Legislature and from Tillamook and Clatsop counties for more logging and timber revenues.

Increasing logging was just the start, though. The Board of Forestry also launched an effort to rewrite its definition of the "greatest permanent value" of the state forests as being timber production. This contradicts the existing definition: " healthy, productive and sustainable forest ecosystems that over time and across the landscape provide a full range of social, economic and environmental benefits to the people of Oregon."

Granted the people of rural Oregon have been hit hard in the last 20 years by declining timber production and revenue. It's understandable to want to bring more jobs back to logging towns like Vernonia, Mill City, and Willamina. Even so, cutting down every tree in sight is a matter of cutting off the nose to spite the face.

Oregon's forests are bountiful enough to provide plenty of timber that is logged sustainably. We don't need scorched-earth tactics in order to get this job done. And while this should not be an either-or choice of ecosystems and beauty versus economics and jobs, it's not merely empty romanticism to look at the forests from a speeding car and lament the devastation. It's not just loggers and logging companies that have a stake in Oregon's forest, but every Oregonian. And I'm quite confident that if you polled every resident of this state, the case for massive clearcutting would be sawed and felled in no time.

Most people in the local architecture and building community know Jeff Joslin for his role as the Land Use Manager for the City of Portland, overseeing design review and historic landmarks review. But he's also a property owner on Sauvie Island, and Joslin has a bone to pick with his neighbor, the industrial dump that is looking to expand.

Joslin's property, which contains wetlands listed on the National Wetlands Registry, sits next to a 25-acre property owned by ESCO, and industrial foundry in Northwest Portland. Since 1977 ESCO has dumped foundry by-products like furnace brick and glassy slag there. (I just love the phrase "glassy slag".) As reported by The Sentinel, a North/Northeast Portland paper, last year the company applied for a conditional-use permit to raise the permissible height of its dump by 14 feet.

Joslin and his neighbors argued that the dump was a non-conforming use on land currently zoned for agriculture. The site currently also drains water into Joslin's protected wetlands. He argues it could also begin leaching contaminated groundwater. In fact, Joslin spent $25,000 of his own money on consultants (hydrologists, land-use, engineers, lawyers) to create evidence against the expansion. City employees must be better compensated than I imagined, because Joslin apparently sold his 1997 Porsche 911 to pay for the consultants.

But Multnomah County disagreed. Last month they approved ESCO's request to hugely increase their Sauvie Island industrial dump. County officials cited the fact that while Sauvie Island is zoned for agriculture, it can be used as a dump as long as it is in continuous use as one. In other words, the dump shouldn't be there, but it's been grandfathered in. And because of this idiocy, not only did poor Jeff just gave away a supercar for nothing, but the beautiful sanctuary that is Sauvie Island is gearing up to become a bigger landfill.

Maybe in some future autumn, instead of a corn maze at local farms, they can have one made of glassy slag.

Now Joslin is gearing up for an appeal. We're with you here at Portland Architecture, Jeff!